


Expressions of Color

by Westgate (Harkpad)



Category: Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Genderqueer Character, Genderqueer Clint, Multi, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M, transvengers, transvengers assemble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-08 00:01:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188189
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Harkpad/pseuds/Westgate
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint has been undercover as hired muscle for a month. That's a long time immersed in the masculine. Now he's coming home to Phil and Natasha, and they help him find balance again, and accept him for who he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Expressions of Color

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This was a prompt from alientourist on tumblr as part of the Transvengers Assemble kickoff. Check out the tag Transvengers on tumblr for some great stuff.

Long missions fuck with his head. Long can mean a couple things; even a two-week mission can be long if he’s having to play muscle or soldier, or even average dude. If there’s one thing Clint Barton is not, it’s an average dude.

So yeah, if he’s playing a role like that for too long, he starts to want to shake out of his skin. His dreams fill up with grotesque masquerade balls ending in blood-soaked visions of fakes, and he wakes trembling in fear of dying in a costume. Anger spikes easily on these missions, and holding one of these roles in place consumes every bit of his energy. He does it well because he’s a fucking professional, but he has to transform into someone so far away from himself to do it that he always fears never finding a way back.

This was a long mission.

His jeans are soaked with mud, and his boots that started out a pretty brushed gold color are now a dingy, wet brown. He sits in the chopper shivering, pulls his torn canvas jacket closer to his neck and hugs himself tightly. He has to hold it together a while longer, but he feels like pieces of him are threatening to fall away. When they get to New York airspace and the pilot tells Clint they’re only about twenty minutes from base, the shivering amps up to full-on trembling. His hand is clenched, digging his fingernails into his palms hard enough to leave a mark. The stress of holding himself in feels like he’s hanging from a dusty, rocky cliff with rocks digging into his hands and wind threatening to blow him into the deep canyon below. He feels too tight, too dirty, too much the muscle guy he’d been playing for a month.

Too much the _guy_.

‘Fuck,’ he thinks. He still has a med check to pass, and they might or might not get pissy and try to make him stay. He hasn’t eaten anything in three days and he just drank his first water in two, so they might get pissy. Clint closes his eyes and hopes that Phil or Nat are there to help him make his case for ditching medical and getting himself the hell home.

It works. Phil is standing, despite the late hour, on the tarmac when Clint climbs carefully out of the helicopter, and he guides him to medical and hovers close while Dr. Harbing checks Clint out. The doctor knows both men well, and that works in Clint’s favor today. “I know you don’t want to stay. If you were anyone else I’d _make_ you stay. I want to run an IV for an hour to get your electrolyte levels up a bit, but then as long as Agent Coulson stays with you, you can head out,” he says, and Phil nods.

Two hours later Phil is letting them into their large apartment and Natasha is standing in the slate foyer in her green silk pajamas, pulling off Clint’s coat and leaning in for a long, slow kiss as Phil leans against them both, running his hand down Clint’s back and arms. The warmth from his two lovers envelopes him and he pulls back from Natasha and leans his head on Phil’s shoulder. “I need to take a bath,” he mumbles, and leans over to take off his mud-soaked boots.

Natasha nods. “A month was long. You probably need more than that. Do you want help?”

“No. Not yet. You can do my toes later, though,” he says with a grin. Home is good.

“What about me?” Phil asks, and his voice is playful and so light compared to when they were at base an hour ago. Clint needs to soak in Phil’s home-voice right now.

“Can you read to me while I get cleaned up?” Sometimes Clint worries that he sounds pathetic to Phil and Natasha – the things he needs from them are so different than what they need from him, after all. But then Phil turns Clint for a kiss of his own and looks at him with such adoration that Clint stops worrying.

“Yes,” he answers, and Clint nods and heads upstairs to the bathroom to get the hell away from that mission. He dumps his bag in their bedroom, and heads to the bathroom. It’s technically the master bathroom, but Natasha uses the guest bathroom downstairs because Clint has ‘more crap than a supermodel’ and Phil’s stuff pushes it over the edge into not enough room for all three of them. So this one is primarily Clint’s (Phil doesn’t have much beyond his razor and aftershave and toothbrush after all), and Clint loves it.

He looks at the honey gold-colored oversized tub sunk deep in the floor and the short wall around it with candles and a green, leafy planter and sighs. He turns the brass spout on and lets the tub fill with water and pumps in a few pumps of lavender bubble bath from the bottle sitting near the window as he strips out of his filthy clothes. He peels them off in layers and puts them in the wicker hamper in the corner. When they’re out of sight he stands naked in the soft light of the room and breathes deeply.

The scent of lavender seems to penetrate his muscles and his skin feels like it’s loosening around him. He gathers a few more things and then steps into the hot water. He’s been taking cold showers in a dusty warehouse for a month, so the bubbles filled with heat seem lavish and he sinks down and closes his eyes.

He hears Phil enter and turn the lights down a little. He’s going to read, so Clint hasn’t bothered with the candles this time, and he watches as Phil sits down on the wide edge of the tub and leans against the periwinkle tiled wall. He’s changed into navy blue flannel pajamas himself, and he has his glasses on, a sight that sends a shiver of lust through Clint’s body. It settles into a low heat after a moment, though. Clint is tired and needs to minister to himself before thinking of Phil and Natasha and their hands on his body.

Phil starts to read, and his voice fills the bathroom as Clint reaches for the shampoo and massages his hair and scalp. He has to consciously stop himself from scrubbing too hard – it’s not just dirt and grease he’s trying to wash away. The cadence of Phil’s voice grounds him, though, and he rinses the shampoo from his hair, lathers one leg with soap, and reaches for the razor.

He’s home now, and he won’t have to go back out on an op for at least a month after a deep cover mission like this one, so as he can do this; he needs to do this. Each stroke of the blade along his leg feels like he’s slicing off the pieces of his month-long persona. ‘sssct,’ and that’s the bluster. ‘sssct,’ and that’s the dumb humor he’s had to use for the role. ‘ssssct,’ and that’s the blood he’s spilled. ‘sccct,’ and that’s the yelling and cussing and treating people like dirt. ‘ssccct,’ and that’s the threatening he did every day. Each stroke is a layer. Each stroke makes Clint feel clean, and as he rinses the soap off and runs his calloused hand over the smooth skin, something loosens in his chest as he touches _himself_ for the first time in a month.

Phil reads as Clint shaves, never falters, never looks up, and Clint is grateful for the simple gift. After the hair, dirt, and layers are gone from Clint’s legs, he does the same to his armpits, and then he sets the razor back on the side of the tub. He puts his hands under his arms, rubs his chest, and decides to wait until later to take that part on. Now he soaps the rest of his body and rinses. Phil sets the book aside and holds a fluffy, lavender towel out for him and he stands and leans into it, letting Phil help draw it tight around his shoulders and rub the water from his almost pink skin.

He slips into his deep purple terrycloth bathrobe and moves to the sink as Phil leaves him alone for a bit. He vigorously brushes his teeth and then pulls some tweezers out of a drawer. He thins out his eyebrows, letting the tiny stings wake him a little – the bath and soft robe are making him kind of hyper focused on the bed in the other room. After he does his eyebrows, he trims his fingernails, clipping away the evidence of stress-filled nail-biting. He rubs lotion into his face, breathing its flowery scent and letting it soothe away the anger he’d been fighting inside and out for the last month.

He brushes his hair with his favorite ocean-blue hairbrush and feels the strokes pushing away the most important thing that’s piled way too high in the last month – the masculine. God, he’d had to play the tough, and there’s no room for _anything_ except hyper masculine in that role. The hairbrush seemed to stroke it away, leaving Clint feeling content and balanced again.

Phil had asked him, years ago when he first realized that Clint wasn’t as masculine as his appearance at work led people to believe, if he felt like a woman. Clint had turned his mouth down in frustration as he’d finished brushing his cheeks lightly with rouge before one of their early dates. It wasn’t that he felt like a woman, he tried to explain, it’s that he didn’t feel like a man. Back and forth, he’d said. Both. Neither. It was hard to explain, so he stopped trying, and Phil stopped asking. Instead he just read to him in the tub or bought him the lace underwear he loved to wear or sparred with him until they were sweaty and laughing in the wide open space of their living room.

Now, Natasha is waiting in the bedroom when Clint comes out of the bathroom, and after he pulls on a silk nightshirt and his favorite underwear, he crawls onto the bed and sprawls unceremoniously across it, laying a foot heavily on her lap and looking up at her. She raises an eyebrow, smiles softly, and says, “I was thinking emerald green tonight. You’ll match my pajamas.” He nods and closes his eyes as she pulls a small bottle from the nightstand and begins to paint his toenails. He dozes lightly while she does it, listening to her tell him about her own recent mission to Egypt, laughing when she describes the mark she’d been sent to handle. Soaking in the lack of expectations of him. Before long, she’s rubbing his smooth legs and leaning over him.

“Phil ordered food. Said you hadn’t eaten in a while.”

He groans and rolls off the bed, careful of the still-drying polish. “That’s an understatement.” They head out to the kitchen together, where Phil has two kinds of soup, hard-crusted bread, and three kinds of salads laid out on the breakfast bar. Clint’s stomach growls and he pours himself a bowl of miso soup and fills a small plate with bread and the plainest salad of the bunch. He doesn’t want to make himself sick.

They eat in silence, and Clint sits there in his bathrobe with his clean legs and painted toenails and soaks up Natasha and Phil’s presence and feels a little like a bolt finally sliding into place. Tomorrow they’ll visit the conservatory downtown and Clint will touch the flowers and breathe the perfumed air and lean against Phil and hold Natasha’s hand, and he’ll readjust, rebalance, and he’ll wear makeup if he wants to or he might not, but he’ll feel like himself again no matter what, because he’ll be home and with the two people he loves the most and he can be whoever he feels like being.

That’s the problem with long missions, after all. He has to be one color and one color only, and, like most people, Clint Barton is not just one color. Like most people, he’s filled with different colors, and the palette he uses to paint who he is _holds a lot_ of colors to choose from.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
